Nobel Peace Prize winner brings message to Seattle

Her movement to plant trees changed Kenya

Published 9:00 pm, Friday, March 17, 2006

Wangari Maathai's movement started small. Her mission initially was to encourage fellow Kenyan women to plant trees -- for the environment and for self-empowerment.

Her group, started in the 1970s, grew into the Green Belt Movement, a powerful grass-roots association that has changed the Kenyan landscape, by planting millions of trees and by helping thousands of Kenyan women and men become active participants in their government.

Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, spoke at Benaroya Hall Friday evening. She urged an enthusiastic audience to work to protect the environment and the planet's resources.

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Protecting the environment, she said, is a necessary foundation to promote peace and social justice. "Peace cannot be seen in isolation," Maathai said during her speech, which was part of Foolproof's American Voices Series. "You cannot have peace if you don't take care of the environment."

Maathai, a biologist, has been a trailblazer in a lot of ways. She was the first woman in her region of Africa to receive a doctoral degree. In December 2002, she was elected to Kenya's Parliament with 98 percent of the vote. And by speaking to activist groups and governments around the world, she has become an ambassador for sub-Saharan African women, environmentalists and human rights workers.

By empowering women to plant trees, Maathai said, her group helped them take greater control of their civic and family lives and helped them realize the importance of protecting their communities' environments and ecosystems.

But much work still needs to be done throughout the region, she said, to pressure governments to stop deforestation and other anti-environmental practices that are sowing conflict among farmers, cattle ranchers, growing communities and their governments, all of whom need water and sustainable resources.

"With the limited resources we have, unless we learn to live with each other in justice, within the rule of law, we are bound to destroy each other," Maathai said.

Maathai said she made a point to visit Starbucks' headquarters while in Seattle. She lauded the company's efforts to buy its coffee directly from African coffee farmers, as opposed to government and business middlemen who have fleeced the farmers for decades. Starbucks and other such progressive companies, she said, "create greater justice and greater equity in the way we manage our resources."